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A Probabilistic Approach To The Design Of Heat Pipes, Charles C. Roberts Jr.

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

The design of heat pipes involves knowledge of phenomena such as surface tension forces, wick permeability, and fluid vaporization and condensation. Considerable variability in these phenomena has been observed in heat pipe experiments. Thus, a probabilistic design model for predicting heat pipe heat transfer rate has been developed taking into consideration uncertainty in the prediction of the above phenomena. The probabilistic model yields a mean, a standard deviation, and the distribution of heat transfer rate based on the means, standard deviations, and distributions of the design parameters. The probabilistic method is compared to experimental data from heat pipes with wire …